The Super Barbarians by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

been inside this fortress for so long without exploiting my advantage.
    I came up to the gate and knew I had already been spotted by Swallo through his system of spy mirrors, for when I was still twenty paces away title great double doors creaked a yard apart in the center and made room for me to pass between. I didn’t continue directly across the main yard to my quarters in the family’s block, of course, but turned into Swallo’s office.
    I knew at once something was badly wrong. For Swallo had taken out the misshapen talisman from under his table—the one he claimed had saved him at the Battle of Fourth Orbit—and set it in plain view in front of him. He only did that when there was trouble.
    He gazed at me stonily. “You’ve been a nuisance,” he said without rancor. “If you’d been here, things would have been a lot quieter.”
    “Why? What’s happened?”
    “Pwill came back in a boiling temper from the city and sent for you. And today of all days you choose not to be present.”
    My heart sank. “Where is he JIOW?” I demanded.
    “Storming in the Grand Terrace,” Swallo answered shortly. “Or was at last report. If you see anyone going around like a kicked cur, that’ll be why.”
    “He wasn’t due back till an hour before sunset!” I said.
    “Pwill doesn’t take much account of clocks,” Swallo answered.
    I hefted the weight of the can in my bundled-up cloak. It would be safer with Swallo than anyone, I thought. I handed it through the window of his office.
    “Guard this till I come back,” I requested. “I think it best to go and face Himself at once.”
    Swallo shrugged and took the cloak, feeling the weight in its folds but not asking questions. I was sure he would look when I had gone, but the can was unlabeled and short of opening it he would learn nothing. I wasn’t even sure that opening it would tell him anything, unless he sampled the contents and suddenly found himself irresistible to all the women on the estate, perhaps.
    I departed at a run.
    All the way across the main yard, along the corridors, up the stairs to the upper floor where the Grand Terrace was set to face the afternoon sun, people with faces as miserable as Swallo had warned me to expect kept recognizing me and throwing their hands up in gestures of relief. Some of them barked at me, demanding where I’d been all this time. I didn’t answer, and they didn’t try to stop me. Assuming he had come straight back here from his unsuccessful interview with Olafsson, Pwill Himself had had about two hoursin which to make his entire retinue and probably some of the less fortunate of his tenants feel the lash of his wrath.
    Yesterday, it occurred to me, I would have gone quaking to face him in a mood like this; he was seldom really angry, though for show and to impress his inferiors he sometimes feigned rage. But today, having seen him come away from Olafsson’s as I had—defeated, on some small matter possibly, but defeated, by an Earthman—I felt a buoyant confidence. I was prepared to outface him, outwit him and, if I had to, outshout him.
    When I came to the doors of the Grand Terrace the guards on duty there practically fell over each other with eagerness to let me by and take away the source of Himself’s anger.

CHAPTER VII

    A LTHOUGH IT WAS also an earsplitting bellow, the tone in which the nomenclator the other side of the terrace door announced my name and office was by way of a sigh of relief. Himself, pacing the white-tiled floor and snapping the heads off pot-plants with a swagger stick, halted and spun on his heel to look at me. In the long moment before he decided what first to blister my ears with, I saw that Over-lady Llaq was seated in one of the ornate chairs along the banquette of the terrace—her round, heavily lined face severe above her gorgeous robe of brocade—with three maids-in-waiting on cushions at her feet. Their faces were nervous, although they were trying desperately to smile. I also